Sacred Games (67 page)

We lived this life, and dreamed of the outside. But this is the life we had to live, the only one. So I told Date and Kataruka something of my plan, and told them I needed two fresh men, two men unconnected to our company. But these needed to be two hard boys, capable of action, not the type who would boast and preen but then be paralysed by the sight of blood. Date and Kataruka complained, they shook their heads and said it was impossible to depend on men who had remained untested, untried. That's exactly why we make it hard to get into the company, they said, so we can see if the applicant has the belly for the job. That's why we send them on errands first, a minor beating or two, so they can prove them
selves, make their way up in the proper manner. But no, I insisted. I want new faces, two with no earlier connection to us.

So they found me two, Dipu and Meetu. These were brothers originally from up north, they had come to Bombay with degrees from some college in gaandu Gorakhpur. They were twenty-two and twenty-one, real bhaiyyas, farmer's sons. They had stayed with some taxi-driving fellow Gorakhpuri, and tossed about from job to job. Dipu had sold detergent door to door, Meetu had worked as a salesman in a bathroom fittings shop. They were eager lads, full of energy, and they had gone up and down the length of the city, hanging from the trains, seeing all the sights. Just when they had been broken a bit, when they had begun to understand that all dreams didn't come true in this Mumbai, that not every fool from UP became Shah Rukh Khan, they got a call from a second cousin in Lucknow. He had a scheme, a project. He said he was going to start a business in Lucknow, with some buying and selling to do in Bombay. For that he needed to open a bank account in the city, have some funds available and ready there. So Dipu and Meetu were to start a joint account. He would send them the money to deposit in the account, and further instructions about who was to be paid and so on. A week later they received, by courier, a bank draft for a lakh and a half. The draft went through, and as instructed, they took forty thousand for expenses. A high time they had then, and a week later, another draft arrived, this time for two lakhs. The bank manager told them that the formalities would take a day, that the funds would be released the next morning. So back to the bank our two brothers went. They went to the counter, grinning, and the next second, they were down on the ground, with policemen's pistols pushing into their necks.

‘Unmarked jeeps, bhai,' Dipu said. He was the one telling the story. ‘And so we were trapped. The drafts were stolen, they told us while they beat us at the station. We had been betrayed by our own cousin.'

‘Listen, bhenchod,' I said. ‘You act innocent in front of the judge. If you tell me lies, I'll tear off your golis. You mean to tell me that you opened an account and deposited drafts out of innocence? What kind of business was it supposed to be?'

He swallowed. ‘I don't know, bhai.'

‘You didn't know, and you obeyed your cousin blindly? And you thought you were getting forty thousand for going to a bank in a clean shirt and pants? Maderchod, don't lie to me. You knew quite well those were stolen drafts.'

He and his brother had the same broad face, as homely as a shovel. He blinked, thought and then gave up. ‘Yes, bhai. Only we thought one more draft wouldn't hurt.'

They were jumped-up peasants who thought they knew more than they did, and so they had fallen easily into the hands of the police. Dipu told me the rest of the story. The police had thrashed the name and address and phone number of the cousin out of them, but of course the cousin had flown his Lucknow coop. Then the policiyas beat them some more, on the bottom of the feet with pattas, on the hands with canes, in the kidneys with fists. They threatened them with encounters, told them they were going to drive them to the seaside and put bullets in their heads. They told them they were going to send the UP police to their father's farm, to their mother's kitchen. ‘Bataa re,' the inspectors said. ‘Kaad rela.' But these brothers had nothing more to tell, and the cousin was gone, so finally the investigation was closed, and Dipu and Meetu were in jail, awaiting trial. The inspector on their case had told them that if they paid him a lakh, he would not object in court to them getting bail, and for fifty thousand, the public prosecutor would also keep quiet, and so then their lawyer's notice would sail through the court, and they would be out on bail. And even though they were in on serious charges, not just 420 for cheating, but also 467 and 468 for forgery, the inspector could manage bail for them. For a higher price, even, the whole case could be managed. But Dipu and Meetu had already spent whatever they had left of the forty thousand on their lawyer, and they had spent whatever little their father could come up with. So here they were, in judicial custody, waiting for their trial, waiting for their dates. They had been inside now for six months. There were men who had been waiting for a year. There were some ragged bastards who had waited for three years, and for four, and – so I heard – even a few for seven. So Dipu and Meetu, who had acted like fools but were capable of learning, had made approaches to my boys. And now they were talking to me, in the bathrooms of Barrack Four, long after nightfall.

I took them in. They told me they were capable of bloody work, that growing up in Gorakhpur had hardened them, that student union politics there meant canvassing with knife and lathi, that their district had produced several famous dakoos, that it was in their blood. I hadn't the opportunity of testing them, because they had to stay quiet, stay unnoticed, stay separate from my company. But they were mine.

Every week, I went to the special court for my bail hearings. The jailers
always put other prisoners in the van, anyone who had a hearing at court that day. So Dipu and Meetu went to court in the same van as I did, we arranged it so with the lawyers and the judges. It was me, these two brothers, and either Date or Kataruka. We alternated these last two, and so it was always one of them sitting to my left, on the bench that ran down the side of the van. At my feet, on the ground, among the general ruck of prisoners, Dipu and Meetu. And opposite me, facing us, on the other bench, men from other companies. It was always like this in the van: the bhais sat on the benches, and the ordinary prisoners on the floor. Date and Kataruka would have preferred that I was not there at all when we executed the plan, they didn't want to expose me to danger. They tried to persuade me to leave it all to them, but I told them that it was crucial that I be there, that without me there was no need for this plan. Then I told them to shut up. And day after day, I waited in the van.

The first two weeks, on the facing bench were men from other companies, not Suleiman Isa's. The third week, Kataruka and I were already sprawling on our bench when the Suleiman Isa boys came into the van. There were four of them, none that I recognized, but Kataruka sat up to my left, flexing the rope on his wrists. We went to the courts bound like animals, roped to each other. But there was rope enough for what we had to do. The Suleiman Isa men arranged themselves, made themselves comfortable, and grinned at me. They were amused, and they were without fear.

‘What are you laughing at, maderchod?' Kataruka said. He was very fair, my Kataruka, but very pock-marked. Quiet most of the time, but he spoke up then.

‘No need for tension,' I said to him. I was very relaxed myself. I could feel my blood singing, but I felt calm. The Suleiman Isa boys were quite relaxed too, because they were four and we were two, because they had heard that I was really a coward.

‘Is your gaand still sore?' one of them said to me. ‘We heard that Parulkar took it every night for months. He said that you were a good gaadi to mount, that you moaned like a girl.'

I smiled back at him. ‘Parulkar is an honest policeman,' I said. ‘What he says must be true.' I shifted back on the bench and raised my knee, put my foot up on the bench, and scratched at my ankle.

They were laughing, all of them. The front doors of the van clanked shut, and the engine creaked itself up into a long vibration that drowned out their giggles, and the van jerked forward, and I said very quietly, ‘Dipu.'

He was fast all right, this Dipu. I barely saw his hand move, it passed, and the Suleiman Isa boy on the right, for a moment he didn't even know he had been cut. He just sat, and then the blood sprayed across the van. And then we were on them, cutting. We were using blades, not the shaving kind but the heavier industrial ones that are used for cutting cardboard or tape, which we had smuggled from the jail workshop. We had split each blade in half, melted rubber on the broken side to make a kind of handle, and then we had slid the blades into the sides of our rubber Kitto chappals, into the heels. It took a second's knocking with a fingertip to find the blade in the chappal and pull it gently out. And then we were on them, cutting.

They were all sliced before any of them could raise a hand in defence. They were expecting two, and we were four. Make a man bleed and you will break his courage. And I had told my boys to go for their eyes. A razor blade will not kill, but it will put blood in the eyes and blind. So only two of them really fought back, the other two were shouting and panicking and trying to lose themselves in the howling mêlée of prisoners. I was calm. I dodged and waited and cut, and cut. There is a vast pressure of blood in a man's head, a quantity that you cannot imagine. It squirts like a pichkari, in quick jets with the beating of the heart. Our attack must have lasted barely a minute, but in the pleasure of my stabbing and slashing, time expanded into a long emporium of opportunities. I tell you I could see through the confusion and know the opening before it existed, I could wait and weave and then come through precisely and
cut
. In my calm I knew the van was stopped and the havaldars and the inspectors were struggling with the doors. I swayed back from the struggle, back towards the bench, let myself sit. ‘Give me the lambi,' I snapped out to Meetu.

With a roll of his eyes he slapped it into my left hand, the lambi that he had carried inside his blue legal file, tucked behind the thick sheaf of papers and notices and reports. The lambi was actually a hinge from a bathroom door inside the barrack, carefully unscrewed and then shaped and sharpened on stone, given a handle by a wrapping of electrical wire. With it in my hand I went knee over knee, over the mass of men. I had seen the one I wanted, seen his face masked dark with blood. He put up his hands as I came towards him. There was a single twisting thrust, with my shoulder behind it, that I knew completely before I ever did it. I put the lambi in his neck. Then the policemen were on us.

They dragged us out with a great shouting and hubbub, there were
dozens of them. We were grinning at each other. There was a cut on the back of Dipu's left hand. ‘I cut myself, bhai,' he said. ‘But I cut them more.'

‘Chutiya,' I said, smiling.

Then they dragged us off to the anda cells. Into the high tanki-shaped building we went, and into the sunless cells. The others they shoved two by two through the low doors of the cells, but they took me down one level and made me bend and shoved me forward and then I was alone. It was dark, very dark. Finally I could make out two concrete slabs on either side of the circular room, and a hole in the ground between them. Two beds and a latrine. I was sweating. I felt my way around the walls, as high as I could go. No windows, not a shelf or a switch or a plug, nothing but the egg-smooth concrete. I sat on one of the beds for a long time. Then I took off my shirt and folded it and made a pillow. I lay down. Then I started laughing.

They kept me in the anda cell for two weeks. They shoved food and water through the door, and I lived alone in that stinking hell. The dark, it is the dark that cuts your heart, that slices through your brain. I tried to keep track of the hours, I tried to walk around the cell in fast circles, to keep healthy. I tried to sleep, and keep awake during what must have been the day. But soon I couldn't tell any more. I tried to calculate time by the meals, but they must have given me food whenever they felt like it, it came to me cold and congealed, and I could swear that many days and nights passed before I heard the door scrape open again. And there was the rasp of my own breath, in and out, in and out, for centuries. I would open my eyes and know that only a minute had passed, or two. Yet I had been walking for an eternity along a swampy seashore. Another long minute waited, stretching its chasm before me. And then another one. I tried to imagine a clock, I hammered a nail into the wall and hung up a gold clock, with one of those swinging weights, I thought I could have it keep time for me. But my clock yawned and melted and vanished, and its hands curled and looped. I had heard that the anda cells could drive men into madness, and now this black room was testing me.

In this dark, women came to me. They walked through me with a cool tinkling of anklets. I lay flat on my back and they were floating above me, with their slim, red-patterned feet and dimpled ankles. The edges of their ghagras brushed softly across my cheeks, and I felt their footsteps on my chest, light as a blessing. In this indistinct dream, in the airy touch of their gauzes, I was delivered from my prison. They talked among themselves in
a murmuring just under my understanding, in a whispering that became a faint music. I floated. I was gone.

When they took me out of the anda cell I didn't know how long it had been, two weeks or two thousand years. I shielded my eyes and asked nothing from the jail staff, or the policemen. Parulkar was there, abusive and puffed out in that strutting-cock way of his, and under his lead they dragged all of us through the compound and into the superintendent's office. Then there was of course more abuse and threats, and warnings of added charges and long sentences. But all of it was an empty show, because they knew and we knew that it had been our win. It was a small skirmish, but we had won. And however minor our conquest had been, it made a world of difference to my boys, and to me. Sometimes, that's how it is. So, standing straight under the fuss that the jailers and Parulkar were making, I came back to myself. On the desk there was a calendar that told me the date, 28 December. I had been inside the anda cell for thirteen days and one night. Time fell into place around me, with the sound of metal falling on to metal. I stood up straight. I kept myself quiet, kept my face straight and my eyes lowered, but I grew strong again. From the commotion they were making, it was clear that they were trying to fight me back from my moral victory. I knew that all my boys, in the barrack and outside, had heard of our battle, and they were strong again. I kept quiet. I was satisfied.